Nobody needs the costs associated with downtime, but it’s going to happen and it’s something which needs to be planned for.
Downtime can wreck your IT budget, so preparing for downtime isn’t enough. What you need to do is expect downtime and budget for it. Downtime is commonly caused by:
• User error: Employees make mistakes. An employee could move the wrong file to the wrong location. A user could have access to data they’re not supposed to, and get phished by a scammer.
• Hacking attacks: If your network gets breached and infected by viruses or malware, you’ll probably lose data. Ransomware encrypting your data can freeze your infrastructure.
• Natural disasters: Floods, fires, earthquakes, electrical storms, hurricanes, and many more, are all examples of disasters that can lead to downtime.
• Hardware failure: Technology certainly isn’t built to last forever, and you shouldn’t expect it to. Even the hardiest of servers will eventually need to be replaced. Hardware failures seem to happen at the worst times and lead to significant data loss.
The Solution
To combat the threat of network downtime, disaster recovery planning is a necessity. This is an important part of a business continuity plan that’s designed to get your organization up and running following a disaster. You need reliable data backup, and a way to rapidly recover it. Data backup is a vital part of disaster recovery planning in the event of a disaster.
We recommend cloud-based BDR over tape backup, with backups every 15 minutes. BDR can almost instantaneously restore your data, avoiding more downtime, and is less vulnerable to user error.
To learn more about mitigating network downtime, and to ask us about our BDR solution, call us at (973) 882-4644.